urgot, as from the nearly perfect identity of leading passages in their
writings. Let us add that in Turgot's fragments we have what is
unhappily not a characteristic of Condorcet, the peculiar satisfaction
and delight in scientific history of a style which states a fact in such
phrases as serve also to reveal its origin, bearings, significance, in
which every successive piece of description is so worded as to be
self-evidently a link in the chain of explanation, an ordered term in a
series of social conditions.

Before returning to Condorcet we ought to glance at the remarkable
piece, written in 1784, in which Kant propounded his idea of a
universal or cosmo-political history, which contemplating the agency of
the human will upon a large scale should unfold to our view a regular
stream of tendency in the great succession of events.[55] The will
metaphysically considered, Kant said, is free, but its manifestations,
that is to say, human actions, 'are as much under the control of
universal laws of nature as any other physical phenomena.'

The very same course of incidents, which taken separately and
individually would have seemed perplexed and incoherent, 'yet viewed in
their connection and as the action of the human _species_ and not of
independent beings, never fail to observe a steady and continuous,
though slow, development of certain great predispositions in our
nature.' As it is impossible to presume in the human race any _rational_
purpose of its own, we must seek to observe some _natural_ purpose in
the current of human actions. Thus a history of creatures with no plan
of their own, may yet admit a systematic form as a history of creatures
blindly pursuing a plan of nature. Now we know that all predispositions
are destined to develop themselves according to their final purpose.
Man's rational predispositions are destined to develop themselves in the
species and not in the individual. History then is the progress of the
development of all the tendencies laid in man by nature. The method of
development is the antagonism of these tendencies in the social state,
and its source the _unsocial sociality_ of man--a tendency to enter the
social state, combined with a perpetual resistance to that tendency,
which is ever threatening to dissolve it. The play of these two
tendencies unfolds talents of every kind, and by gradual increase of
light a preparation is made for such a mode of thinking as is capable of
'exalting a s